Sleep
by abetternameneeded
Summary: Alice struggles to sleep once she and wish!Hook are seperted. Tumblr user: wicked-storybrooke helped with the idea


**A/N: Based on a discussion on sleep habits and some research on solitary confinement. **

**Alice has a hard time with sleeping.**

Alice Jones sat up on her bed. It was too quiet and it was too loud. She could hear the leaves of the trees whispering and hear their branches cracking. Were they angry? She figured they might be. She could hear a silence in her tower. A silence that cut the air far more deeply than the sounds outside her window. Maybe because it was closer. Maybe because it hurt so much more. She was growing quite frustrated. She'd been alone for a few days now. She kept waking up when the sun rose expecting to see papa in his hammock as he always was. And now he wasn't. He couldn't be here any more. That witch, oh she didn't even want to think about who or what she really was, had made him leave her. Blamed him. Alice didn't. She just wanted him back. And Alice didn't have anyone else. She had her toys but she was old enough now to know that they couldn't _really_ talk. She tried to go back to sleep. She couldn't. She pulled her legs up to her chest and burried her face in her knees. Certainly the trees wouldn't mind if she kept them awake with her cries?

The sun rose and so did Alice. She hadn't gotten any sleep. She went about her day doing her best to do things the way she and papa always did. Some she couldn't. She watched out her window listening for any sound. It was so silent. She wasn't used to the quiet. Not like this. Her papa always made her laugh and the tower was made of stone , so her laughter echoed back at her. And he talked to her. For longer than she could even remember. She dreaded when the sky would turn into the pitch black of night and the birds would stop their song. But she wanted to see the stars. She knew all about them. They were a strange sense of comfort in the world. Her world that was so small she could see it all without moving her head. They made her smile and they made her sad. Night fell and she laid back in her bed. Hoping she'd get some sleep. She hummed herself one of papa's lullabies, that always helped her sleep. She drifted off ever so slowly only to be rudely awakened by the sound of something falling. She looked around her vision still blurry and her mind not quite as awake as it should be, _what had fallen? _She couldn't tell. She got up and looked around. _Maybe it was outside?_ But she couldnt check there so she ignored it and laid back down. She tried to hum herself back to sleep but now her mind had more thoughts than she knew what to do with. _What if I can't sleep without papa here? Do I need sleep? I don't go anywhere. I can't go anywhere. What if I'm always stuck here? _The more the thoughts ran across her brain the more her breathing became more labored. More painful. She sat up and curled her knees into her chest, again burying her face into them and letting out tears. She could be as loud as she wanted.

And for days this continued, she'd get up with the sun to make the most of her day after not being able to sleep at night. And she'd cry and worry about things she didn't even understand.

Alice finally had an idea. Oh, she was so tired. She hadn't slept in a few days. Maybe if she slept in papa's hammock she'd feel less alone? It was smaller. Way less room for her to feel the emptiness of the tower. Oh, how she longed to escape this place. And so, when it was dark enough she stared at the hammock. This was admitting something she didn't want to admit. If she slept here, then she'd have to face the reality that papa wasn't coming back anytime soon. That when she woke up he wouldn't be waiting for her to jump on his bed and tell him it was time to play. Wouldn't be there to tell her that she had to eat first. Wouldn't be there to give her as much of the world as he could. She couldn't do it. She sat down next to the hammock with the blanket she had in her hand and cried into it. She was never going to get any sleep, was she? She gave up and went to watch the stars. She was exhausted. She held the blanket and muttered to the stars. And she let out gentle sobs at the fact that she was so very alone. She drifted off into a sleep from the pure exhaustion. The sun rose and a bird made a sound, scaring Alice out of her slumber.

"Did I fall sleep, hatter? Mr. Rabbit?" she asked her toys. "I did? Oh good. But how?"

She hoped it meant her sleep problems were gone. But oh how wrong she was. The night fell and she sat in the same spot in the same exact way. Trying to replicate how she fall asleep the night before. She saw the sun rise after not being able to sleep at all. She sighed and went about her day. She never felt like she was doing enough. But what was there to do? She was so bored. She started to talk to her toys and give them voices just so it wouldn't be so silent all the time. And the cycle continued. She'd be up for days in a row unable to sleep, and then she'd get so tired she'd think about using papa's hammock, but she never could. Not that she believed he would come back anytime soon any more, but she couldn't admit that. She missed him. She knew deep down she would have to escape to see him again. And then in her exhaustion she'd mutter towards the stars or the trees or her toys and fall asleep. She never understood why but she began to function this way. Not expecting to fall asleep some days she'd start to use her nights to play a few extra rounds of chess or have an extra tea party that went into the early hours of the day. She started to plan it well enough that she could sleep in her bed most of the times she did sleep. Some days she was so tired she'd sleep through the entire day, "I don't have anywhere to be. And there's not much to do." she told Mr. Rabbit when he looked at her with those eyes of his glaring into her mind trying to tell her that she really shouldn't stay asleep all day.

Sometimes she'd have horrific nightmares. Some of the memory of when papa had been cursed. Others from something she didn't recognize. Maybe it meant something. She didn't know. And who would she tell? So she'd get scared to sleep. But she'd always become so exhausted that she'd drift into a deep sleep eventually. And she got used to this. And years later when she was no longer alone she never quite completely broke the habit. But she fell asleep much quicker when she wasn't alone


End file.
